By all accounts, Bayonetta will, as director Hideki Kamiya put it, “blow the doors off the action genre.” As the Sarah Palin-esque bespectacled eponymous heroine, players slice, dice, shoot and blast their way through beautifully rendered gothic environments with an extremely high frame-rate with no trace of slow-down.

The controls are typical for the action genre (a mix of strong attack, weak attack, jumping and magic), but there are tons of combos and special moves to memorize. Bayonetta then goes the extra step of letting you practice combos during loading screens, which should come in very handy.

However, something at the heart of this game just feels wrong. Of course, it’s not with the technology. That’s top-notch. But rather, it seems that videogame makers have a nagging tendency to conflate the terms “strong female protagonist” and “sex object.” The character Bayonetta is attractive, sure, but the game takes the idea of “sex appeal” way, way too far.

You see, Bayonetta dresses all in skin-tight black clothing, which also happens to be her magically enchanted hair. So as you use more of her magic attacks, her hair comes off. When you use an especially strong spell, Bayonetta is all but completely naked, with the R-rated bits obscured by narrow strands of hair.

It’s obvious which demographic Sega is trying to market their game to, but I feel like marrying cutting-edge technology with high-school sexual mentality is not the way to get your game taken seriously. Even in the very first trailer released of the game, there’s a deliberate close-up shot of Bayonetta’s crotch. How are you supposed to take her seriously as a heroine after that?

Though I want to make it clear that I’m not objecting on moral grounds. I don’t think Sega should “censor” their game or feel any pressure to sanitize it. This isn’t a matter of morals so much as maturity. Bayonetta clearly has a crack development team, and seeing what they’ve done with their main character makes me imagine Pixar making a porno film.

Bayonetta is sure to be fun to play. There’s little doubt about that. But for anyone looking for a strong female protagonist who isn’t reduced to just another sex object ... well, there’s always Samus.